As the public and private sectors have become more aware of the potential damage caused by waste products produced by industry which are discharged into the atmosphere, there has been an increased recognition and demand for monitoring and minimizing, to the extent possible, the discharge of such materials into the atmosphere. In that regard, the United States government, through the Environmental Protection Agency, has established certain regulations for the level of different types of emissions which may be discharged into the atmosphere.
The EPA monitors compliance with its regulations essentially by requiring those individual companies whom it has licensed to discharge emissions at a certain rate to monitor such discharges and to maintain records of such discharges for reporting to and review by the EPA. Typically, the subject company monitors the output of the air stream being evacuated from equipment which uses substances monitored by the EPA. The company also is required to monitor the discharge stream from the device used to remove the licensed substances from the air stream before it is discharged into the atmosphere. Such a device can be a carbon bed. Monitoring of both the air stream input to and discharged from a carbon bed may be required to document both the level of monitored substance use as well as the level of discharge of that substance into the atmosphere. In that manner, the EPA ensures that companies stay within compliance of their license for that particular monitored substance.
At the present time, while there are instruments available for performing such monitoring functions, accurate instruments are very expensive. Although inexpensive instruments are available, they are very inaccurate. The limitations of those instruments have been recognized by the EPA in the appendices to the proposed enhanced monitoring regulations. Prior to the present invention disclosed herein, the EPA was limited to the standards as currently written because no instruments could provide the level of accuracy of the present invention at a cost which is economical such that the affected industries could afford the equipment. Applicants have invented a system which can perform the measuring, monitoring and reporting of exact concentrations of specific chemicals contained in one or more air streams in a manner which is more accurate than the expensive instruments, at a cost which is cost effective for the affected industries.
In light of the shortcomings of the presently available systems for monitoring and reporting emissions data as discussed above, it would be desirable to provide a reliable and cost-effective method and apparatus which could automatically monitor both the inlet and outlet air streams of, for example, a carbon bed with an accuracy superior to the accuracy obtainable at the present time by existing systems.
In addition, it would be desirable to provide a system for monitoring and reporting emissions data as discussed above which provides for the use of a plurality of parallel processing systems such that the air streams under test can be simultaneously analyzed for a number of different components contained in those air streams. It is also desirable that such a system ensure that the process stream sample or samples analyzed by the emissions monitoring system not be chemically or physically altered by the measurement hardware used by such a system. That is, the integrity of the measurement system and the sample lines should be maintained.